>If because of the way we produce our widgets, we have all other
>nations gunning for us, or we can't breathe the air or drink the
>water, what can better internal social relations do to help? First
>things first. Are agendas blinding us from an understanding of
>priorities?
>--tully
Marxist language barrier. But, as Miles implied, there are Marxists and then there are Heavy Users of Marx here. [1] You can tell if you are a Marxist or a Heavy User. Just take this short test:
1. Do you imbibe Marxism in the morning?
2. Do you ever call in sick because you Used too much Marx?
3. Do you feel the need to Use Marx before you go to a party?
Before work?
4. Do you Use Marx to overcome shyness?
5. Do you Use Marx in the closet or hide your Use of Marx from others?
6. Have you ever felt ashamed after Using Marx?
7. Do you turn prefer seedy or lower environments or a lower class
of people when Using Marx?
7. Do you crave Marx at certain times?
8. Do you have a nip of the Marx that bit ya' after a night of
Using Marx heavily.
9. Do you Use Marx as a way to escape from your problems?
10. Do you Use Marx to shore up your self-confidence?
If you answerd yes to 7 of these questions, you just may be a Marxist. I have figured out a test for Real Marxits (tm).
Butt seriously, if we changed our relations of productions, they'd no longer be gunning for us and, I suspect, we'd take steps to improve the planet (which doesn't mean we can't take them now.)
Miles is talking about the _relations_ of production.
If capital owns the the factories, the office buildings, the machines, the equipment, the land (what Marxists call the _means_ of production) then, in order to live, everyone who doesn't own them (the working class) must sell their labor in order to survive. You are advocating a way to try to get out of that "wage-slavery" -- by creating alternative social institutions and practices. (See more on that, below, WRT MArx's work on The Paris Commune]
So, Marxists usually say that there are two classes, capital and labor (the working class). The are defined by their relation to the means of production: you wither own them or not. You will encounter, every so often, a flare up over whether or not there are gradations with those two major classes whenever someone says something like "Profesional Managerial Class" or uses "working class" to refer to manual labor.
[note: this does not necessarily mean that Marxists and Heavy Users of Marx believe there is no choice or freedom, just that a kind of "real freedom" can only exist when _everyone_ owns and has democratic control over the _means of production_.]
I can't find the ref at the moment, but when Marx was asked which direction the Russians ought to go as the peasants were throwing off the yoke of feudalism, he thought they should live a more anarchist/communal life, as opposed to taking the route of capturing state power. He didn't think the country was developed enough to do so. I'm really sorry I can't find that letter at the mo'. POsted about it here so it's in the archives, I just can't find it.
Oh, and he also talked about how creating alternatives to capitalism were important to the uprising in a work entitled, _The Civil War in France_. You might find it pretty interesting because he's sorta kinda saying what you're saying, but he wasn't an advocate of getting rid of large-scale production. Marx believed we needed a complex division of labor, not what some here might call "primitivism" where people think we have no choice but to return to a less complex, more locally controlled division of labor (which you'll sometimes see abbreviated as DoL).
Reading _The Civil War in France_ again, I just had to post this gem. Marx is a very sarcastic, snarky writer and he uses the best metaphors, like this one:
"Yes, gentlemen, the Commune intended to abolish that class property which makes the labor of the many the wealth of the few. It aimed at the expropriation of the expropriators. It wanted to make individual property a truth by transforming the means of production, land, and capital, now chiefly the means of enslaving and exploiting labor, into mere instruments of free and associated labor. But this is communism, "impossible" communism! Why, those member of the ruling classes who are intelligent enough to perceive the impossibility of continuing the present system and they are many have become the obtrusive and full-mouthed apostles of co-operative production. If co-operative production is not to remain a sham and a snare; if it is to supersede the capitalist system; if united co-operative societies are to regulate national production upon common plan, thus taking it under their own control, and putting an end to the constant anarchy and periodical convulsions which are the fatality of capitalist production what else, gentlemen, would it be but communism, "possible" communism?
The working class did not expect miracles from the Commune. They have no ready-made utopias to introduce par decret du peuple. They know that in order to work out their own emancipation, and along with it that higher form to which present society is irresistably tending by its own economical agencies, they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic processes, transforming circumstances and men. They have no ideals to realize, but to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant. In the full consciousness of their historic mission, and with the heroic resolve to act up to it, the working class can afford to smile at the coarse invective of the gentlemen's gentlemen with pen and inkhorn, and at the didactic patronage of well-wishing bourgeois-doctrinaires, pouring forth their ignorant platitudes and sectarian crotchets in the oracular tone of scientific infallibility.
When the Paris Commune took the management of the revolution in its own hands; when plain working men for the first time dared to infringe upon the governmental privilege of their "natural superiors", and, under circumstances of unexampled difficulty, performed it at salaries the highest of which barely amounted to one-fifth what, according to high scientific authority,(1) is the minimum required for a secretary to a certain metropolitan school-board the old world writhed in convulsions of rage at the sight of the Red Flag, the symbol of the Republic of Labor, floating over the Hotel de Ville.
You can read much more here: http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/r/e.htm
The Civil War in France excerpt is here: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch05.htm
move back up the URL path to find the rest of his writings.
Kelley